39
votes
Accepted
Are there animals that have evolved a resistance to human activity or encroachment?
Note: This is an answer to the last line of your question.
A classical example of animals adapting to the influence of humans on their environment is the adaption of the Peppered Moth.
Here is a brief ...
- 666
35
votes
Accepted
Why does my room suddenly look 'reddish'? My eyes seem to adapt to color
Short answer
The phenomenon you describe can be explained by the negative afterimage effect, which indeed is elicited by adaptive processes in the retinae.
Background
In the retina there are three ...
- 52.6k
25
votes
Are there animals that have evolved a resistance to human activity or encroachment?
Many insects (as well as some other animals) have documented resistance to pesticides.
For example, the German cockroach (Blattella germanica) can be resistant to multiple insecticides1. In addition, ...
- 5,613
18
votes
Are there animals that have evolved a resistance to human activity or encroachment?
Bighorn sheep are developing smaller horns and elephants are becoming tuskless in Africa:
The horns of some bighorn sheep are getting smaller, because hunters are picking off the most impressive ...
- 281
15
votes
Accepted
Why do humans grow taller than their ancestors?
A likely misunderstanding of yours
Now we almost don't fight with other species
Misunderstanding about selection
As you will go through this course, you will understand why this sentence makes ...
- 68.3k
9
votes
Do Traits Have to be Adaptive in Order to Survive?
Good question. And good analysis. I have little to add! I'll simply provide my own list of thoughts to complement your ideas, which are not mutually exclusive.
The fact that it wasn't discarded ...
- 6,272
8
votes
Why do some bad traits evolve, and good ones don't?
All the previous answers are very good. However, I feel a point was missed (or maybe I didn't read deeply enough).
I will highlight the concept of fitness landscapes. This is how it looks:
The peaks ...
7
votes
Accepted
What kind of owl does this moth look like?
First of all what a nice foto!
I think this is Antheraea polyphemus. According to Wikipedia, the moth has an average of 15 cm (6 in).
The purplish eyespots on hind wings give its name - from the ...
- 1,863
6
votes
Accepted
Can the apparent drop in insect population be explained by local insects evolving to avoid traps?
From your own PlosOne link comes proof that the selection pressure was very weak:
"Most locations (59%, n = 37) were sampled in only one year, 20 locations in two years, five locations in three years, ...
- 76
5
votes
Accepted
What of Gould's contributions to evolutionary biology are still accepted in the mainstream?
His main contribution was making biologist consider that population size affects how fast selection changes a population, but he tended to imply this was some form of categorical difference and not a ...
- 15.1k
5
votes
Why do humans grow taller than their ancestors?
In my opinion there is a fallacy in your understanding of evolution. First of all evolution is blind to the future. Also living organisms don't undergo evolutionary changes toward something that might ...
- 175
5
votes
Why do some bad traits evolve, and good ones don't?
Richard Dawkins devoted an entire chapter of The Extended Phenotype to this question, Constraints on Perfection (the third chapter in the edition I have to hand); he listed six (not including those he ...
4
votes
Why do some bad traits evolve, and good ones don't?
Let's break this down to cover your two questions individually
Question 1 If a trait would be advantageous to an organism then why hasn't it evolved yet?
This one is really easy, natural selection, ...
4
votes
Accepted
Are we evolving as fast as the oxygen is depleting?
Good estimates from ice core samples put the decrease in oxygen concentration at 0.7% over the last 800,000 years. At sea level, currently, inspired $P_{O2}$ is (760 mm Hg - 47) * 0.21, approximately ...
- 8,811
4
votes
Are there animals that have evolved a resistance to human activity or encroachment?
Nightingales have adapted to city noises by singing louder. Given that one function of singing is finding a mate there must indeed be a high, direct selection pressure to make oneself heard. Other ...
4
votes
Does a critical mass of infected individuals exist after which mutations will overtake vaccination attempts?
Epidemiological modeling
If a virus is able to change so that it renders previous vaccination inefficient, reinfecting those who were previously vaccinated, one could describe this process using ...
- 3,862
4
votes
Do Traits Have to be Adaptive in Order to Survive?
S Pr lists a number of reasons that might allow non-adaptive traits to spread. One other that's probably important in some populations is "allelic surfing".
If you imagine a smallish population that ...
- 14.3k
4
votes
Accepted
Why do fish and marine mammals need special low density adaptations for buoyancy?
The answer is that air in the lungs of a diving mammal is compressed, meaning that it takes up less volume than air at the surface. This phenomenon is called "Thoracic squeeze". The deeper ...
- 12.9k
4
votes
Accepted
Intelligence without natural selection?
The answer is yes, but really no.
It’s probably true that things were kind of laid back at first for life. But selection was still going on. A strong wave might break the membrane, a strong wind or ...
- 28.3k
3
votes
Can the apparent drop in insect population be explained by local insects evolving to avoid traps?
There are many other lines of evidence over many decades, using many techniques, all showing declines in insect populations.
Climate-driven declines in arthropod abundance restructure a rainforest ...
- 14.3k
3
votes
Why Lungs can't work in water and gills can't work in air?
Misleading sentences in your question
fishes can breathe in water (at least for few-hours)
Fishes can breathe for much longer than a few hours under water as they spend their whole life underwater....
- 68.3k
3
votes
Does a critical mass of infected individuals exist after which mutations will overtake vaccination attempts?
I'm going to answer this one with a No. Outside of a simple simulation with very unrealistic constraints, we can't know the basic parameters to generate such a number. From an omniscient point of ...
- 2,485
3
votes
Evolution of the human Y chromosome
What I want to know, is if this is a bad thing, why don't normal evolutionary forces act to prevent this?
You seem to be attributing a moral value to an evolutionary process. So does the article you ...
- 414
2
votes
Accepted
Can a human increase cold resistance through some practice?
The advanced Tibetan Buddhist meditational practice known as g Tum-mo (heat) yoga allows control of aspects of body temperature.
Physiological measurements on practitioners are described in the paper ...
- 22.8k
2
votes
Is there such thing as Animal non-verbal body language?
Darwin wrote a classical book on the subject, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and [other] Animals. Among other things, he showed how opposite emotions cause opposite movements. For instance, ...
- 1,300
2
votes
insect paralysis in response to predator echolocation frequency
Many different species react to bat echolocation sounds by altering their flight path or diving. This includes moths and mantids, but also other insects such as crickets, flying beetles, and likely ...
- 259
2
votes
What to call a trait that has current utility but unclear evolutionary origin?
As you point out, people have sampled other terms like "aptation" but these terms are not commonly used.
In order to not imply anything about the evolutionary history, since it is unknown, I think it ...
- 46.5k
2
votes
Is Eastern diamondback rattlesnake swimming an example of adaptation?
All snakes can swim. The ability likely was derived from their lizard-like ancestors.
In his book, "How Snakes Work", Harvey Lillywhite (2014) mentions that "all snakes can swim, some ...
- 111
1
vote
Chiasmata and Adaptation
The number of recombination events (chiasmata) varies dramatically from species to species.
It is also unlikely that this number has any universal relationship to selection, though for specific cases ...
- 10.5k
1
vote
Accepted
Is evolution theory falsifiable by whether mutations result in a loss or gain of genetic information?
This might not have a purely objective answer. For example:
Most people lose the ability to digest milk by their teens. A few thousand years ago, however, after the domestication of cattle, several ...
- 3,062
Only top scored, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible